Canadian Copyright Law
by Gerald Trites

The Copyright Act, last amended in 1997, is hopelessly out of debate. The world has changed since then, and has especially changed with regard to the way information is handled and, more importantly, the way people view it. A saying that came out of the information revolution says that "Information wants to be free". Many people, especially those of the younger generation, feel strongly about this. And yet we have new companies, like Google, making billions of dollars on selling information or otherwise building business models that profit from it.

Many traditional industries have been fighting for their lives, notably the music industry and latterly the Movie video industry. The book industry is heading into a revolution of its own, not to mention the newspaper industry. All of these industries need to change their business models to adapt to these new social attitudes about information and still stay in business. Indeed, without some kind of copyright protection, some and perhaps a good deal of, the information products these industries produce would disappear because there would be no profit motive for the preparers, like the artists, musicians and writers.

Reforming the copyright will not be an easy job. Some of the new attidutes are legitimate and endowed with the force of new technologies. Others are not. But is is a job that needs to be done. An article in the Globe and Mail points to some of the issues.